How Higher Education Grew and Why Public Trust Declined in the Process
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on why higher education is losing trust and what it will take to earn it back. Start with Part 1 here.
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If the first big change in higher education was a shift from belief to evaluation, the second has been quieter but just as important.
For the past two decades, higher education has focused intensely on growth: new programs, expanded research enterprises, bigger athletic investments, and new revenue streams across the institution. These have all been funded by increasing federal research grants, federal student aid, increasing tuition revenue, philanthropy, and generally strong borrowing conditions for universities.
Much of that growth made sense, but over time, something subtle happened.
Universities increasingly asked individual families to absorb costs and risks that were once shared more broadly. Some of that is murky in complicated balance sheets, student fees, and indirect cost absorption.
How We Got Here
Decades ago, states invested heavily in public higher education. Tuition stayed relatively low because the cost of running universities was spread across taxpayers, government funding, and philanthropy.
As state funding declined, institutions filled the gap by raising tuition. The federal government offset some of that by increasing access through Pell and other student aid programs. At the same time, enrollment growth encouraged universities to expand programs, research activity, and facilities.
Today, much of that expanded enterprise is financed by students, families, and taxpayers, both directly and indirectly.
The Gap Between Who Benefits and Who Pays
Research remains one of higher education’s strongest contributions to society, producing new knowledge, economic growth, and national competitiveness.
Historically, those benefits were funded collectively through public investment, philanthropy, and shared risk.
What has changed is not the value of research. It is who pays for it.
From inside the institution, the logic holds: research attracts faculty, faculty attract grants, grants enhance reputation, and reputation drives demand.
But families see something different.
They encounter research through higher tuition, larger classes, and more graduate students teaching undergraduate courses.
The benefits feel distant, and the costs feel immediate.
Athletics Shows the Same Tension
What once functioned primarily as a student and alumni experience has evolved into a large commercial enterprise. Media rights deals, conference realignment, and escalating facilities investments have transformed college sports into a major business. NIL has accelerated that shift.
By decentralizing compensation and fundraising, NIL has introduced new financial pressures while competing with traditional advancement priorities. Are we raising money to pay athlete salaries or fund educational missions?
Research and athletics now share several characteristics:
- Both produce real value.
- Both depend heavily on institutional reputation.
- Both are often defended as serving the broader public good.
But both increasingly intersect with household decisions about cost, risk, and return on investment.
This is not simply a communication problem.
It is a structural misalignment.
When activities designed as public goods are financed primarily by private households, trust begins to weaken—even among people who believe strongly in higher education’s mission.
The Hard Questions Institutions Are Avoiding
The cost reallocation now felt at the household level did not happen by accident. It accumulated through decades of decisions that made sense individually and compounded into structural misalignment.
Closing that gap requires leaders to sit with some uncomfortable specifics:
- Are major institutional investments generating real value for students, or primarily signaling prestige?
- Where are families effectively subsidizing activities that benefit donors, alumni, or the broader public more than the students paying tuition?
- Are research and athletics being explained as direct student benefits, or simply as reputation builders?
- Which tradeoffs are institutions willing to acknowledge openly?
Without honest answers to these questions, families’ skepticism is not irrational. And marketing cannot paper over that gap.
From Enterprise Logic to Household Clarity
Once leadership aligns on these questions, marketing can play an important role in rebuilding confidence.
But the job changes: instead of defending institutional priorities, marketing must translate those priorities into clear student benefits.
That means moving beyond generic claims about research rankings or athletic visibility.
It means explaining who benefits and how.
If a marketing team struggles to explain how a major investment improves the student experience, that usually signals a leadership issue.
The Work Ahead
If your institution is defending research or athletics investment to skeptical families, the question is whether those investments are structured to deliver student-facing value or simply assumed to do so.
That clarity has to come from inside the institution first. The communication follows.
In Part 3, I’ll explore what happens when the systems meant to support students and families operate in misalignment.
How Do We Overcome Decades of Irresponsible Growth?
Higher education has spent decades finding new ways to grow revenue. Those decisions made sense in the moment. But over time, they shifted costs, risk, and expectations onto individual families.
The result is a growing misalignment between how institutions operate and how the public experiences them.
In Chapter 2 of our CMO Study, we’ll explore the next question:
If traditional growth models are contributing to the trust gap, what does responsible growth look like now?
Sign up for our upcoming webinar to examine how leading institutions are rethinking enrollment, revenue, and value in a more skeptical market.
Sign Up for the March 26 Webinar
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